Challenging the Power Structure

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American “town square,” the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true “commons,” spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the “commons.” But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare’s time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a “global village.” While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online “blogosphere,” people are gathering. They’re writing and editing their own customized interactive “newspapers” with headline readers and research they’ve done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term “blog” was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it’s often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The “blog movement” is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what’s being put online using blog software has very little to do with the “blog movement” per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person’s content management system. It’s like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The “blog movement” is another thing altogether, and it’s having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

What the blog movement really does is reclaim the public commons for something that could approximate participatory democracy. Bloggers are having an impact on politics in the United States, most prominently at the national level. Increasingly, with grassroots political organizing, a tool called “Meetups,”6 and citizen journalism, their impact is also beginning to be felt at state and local levels.

Why would journalists be leery of the blog movement? Perhaps its massive size 7 and cacophony of voices are off-putting. Unlike with the public square, interactive online spaces place no limits on the number of soapboxes, and interfaces make rude “interruptions” impossible. Headline feed readers assist in the sorting and editing process, and other evolving features online let readers know where the crowds are gathering in the commons, and what ideas are being discussed there.8 In that respect, the movement of crowds online resembles a political caucus, where participants vote with their feet.

A journalist wouldn’t expect every participant at a public hearing to be credible and quotable, but most often I hear journalists dismissing blogs because all bloggers aren’t credible or reliable sources. Why should they be? Would a journalist give prominence to and quote any person on the street, even the drunk that comes stumbling out of a bar?

This electronic commons is also a hybrid, because it’s a publishing space as well as a social space, and that gives a different kind of dialogic voice to the movement. While one person at a public hearing may have a nutty reason for opposing a particular change in the city law, that person didn’t used to have the power to publish that opinion and distribute it widely.

And that brings us to the most crucial issue between journalists and bloggers: power.

The folks who asked me to write this article probably expected me to discuss blogging codes of ethics like the excellent one found at cyberjournalist.net,9 or the “pledge” citizen journalists had to take at Dan Gillmor’s now failed “Bayosphere” project.10

Or perhaps they wanted me to discuss the common complaint made by bloggers against mainstream media, that traditional media methods are too cloaked in a black box and could be ethically suspect, so members of the blogging community often advocate for holding themselves to higher standards of ethical transparency than the mainstream press currently follows.

Those are all important issues because they deal with accountability and corruption, but the reason they are concerned with accountability and corruption is power. Power corrupts. If social and political power were not in play in the day-to-day workings of the mainstream press AND the blogosphere, none of this would be an issue. Until now, mainstream media has been a fairly exclusive gatekeeper to those who hold power.

Journalists approach power brokers in exclusive places on behalf of their readers/listeners/viewers. They must work with their feet in two worlds: the world of the power brokers, and the world of the ordinary people they serve. Corruption and serious ethical lapses in journalism usually happen when a power broker convinces a journalist to use the power of communication in service of the broker instead of the people. Journalists can be targets of such seductions just as surely as politicians can, because they sit at choke points of power, the power of the filter that says, “This gets published this way,” and “this doesn’t get published at all.” There are people who would like to influence that filter for their own benefit. A journalist may even see a way to personally benefit by influencing the filter.

And so long as the world determined and defined by that set of filters is the only game in town, that world rules.

But then along come the bloggers. The blog movement has risen up in open rebellion against the common practices of mainstream media in a self-appointed role as a check and balance against a non-elected, non-governmental entity that nonetheless wields great power. One major sector of the blogosphere devotes itself entirely to media criticism.

Why should bloggers have any power over huge media entities? Why should words disseminated over cyberspace, the words of millions of bloggers, amount to anything except a rising chorus of babble? If ethics are about how one uses power responsibly according to a set of values based on something other than personal gain, would bloggers need ethics if they had no real power?

A peculiar thing is happening to ordinary people in the United States. They may be participating in the public commons in cyberspace on their own time, but their employers are becoming interested in monitoring what they have to say. Unlike when you speak words into the air, words uttered in cyberspace live forever in the ethers, in Google’s long memory. And some people who have signed their names to their words online are losing their jobs over what they have written.

Generally, one would assume the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom to assemble would cover a person in such instances. However, employers who would restrict or monitor employee speech acts in cyberspace could seemingly respond, “Why of course you have freedom of speech. You are free to speak all you want, just as you also are free to not work here.”

Bloggers, dissenting radio stations with significant audiences but few advertisers, and divergent voices can be seen as a threat by powerful people who are willing to use their power to restrict such voices. Perhaps that’s because, as the writers of the U.S. Constitution understood, speech itself is powerful, simply the power of a voice speaking its truth. The kings and lords of our world amass power and wealth at levels that are hard to imagine, yet it appears some of them tremble in the face of free and dissenting speech.

What, then, is the most ethical act a person can engage in right now? What would that radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine have done? Many journalists decry the fact that a number of bloggers are not using their real names and instead adopt pseudonyms on their sites. This, they say, is a lapse in ethics and it undermines the credibility of these sites.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have to find a way to keep a steady paycheck while speaking their truths to power. Free speech uttered while warming one’s hands over a barrel fire under a bridge has very little communicative reach. Anonymity may breed irresponsibility and possibly risk libel, but which ethical value is higher, getting the story out, or putting it away to never see the light of day because the price of putting your name on it is too high?

Think of what our world would be like if the words of many pseudonymous writers in our past had never reached us, including that war correspondent and socialist Eric Blair, an advocate for clear and concrete writing and against the political use of language to deliberately lie and obfuscate. He did that all the while lying about his own identity and hiding behind the fake name of George Orwell.